June 14, 2012

Sign On! The Cultural Community Supports Humane Immigration Solutions. TIME Mag story features undocumented artist!

Big news!! My friend, collaborator, and mentee, Julio Salgado is featured on the cover of TIME magazine today! His story and his work are mentioned in the article written by our friend, Jose Antonio Vargas. The conversation in this country about immigration is about to change!

This proves a point that I make often, that culture is key in transforming the immigration debate and building good will for humane and just solutions to the immigration crisis.

Are you an artist, creative, writer, musician? Can you join the cultural community as we stand with Julio Salgado?

The Culture Community Stands with Julio Salgado

“I make art for survival because it's the only way I know how to speak out and make sure that my story and the story of my community gets noticed. I knew I had to speak for myself and not let others define who I am." - Julio Salgado

Today, Time magazine becomes the first national magazine to put undocumented immigrants right on its cover, in a time when many immigrants still live in hiding. The cover story features two artists: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jose Antonio Vargas and artist Julio Salgado, one of the core members of CultureStrike. A young artist who is redefining the immigrant experience through posters and videos, Julio joined a CultureStrike delegation of artists witnessing the Arizona border and has been crucial in creating a CultureStrike’s national poster project that will launch later this year. A video series he helped create, “Undocumented and Awkward,” mentioned in the Time article, highlights the “painfully awkward moments” of being an undocumented immigrant--and was created at a CultureStrike residency.

We, the cultural community, stand side-by-side Julio Salgado and the millions of other undocumented individuals who are bravely fighting for dignity and acceptance. There are more than eleven million undocumented individuals, like Julio, in the United States. We believe this means there are more than eleven million stories that need to be told. In a time when over a million individuals have been deported in the last three years, Julio represents something different and inspiring: the belief that we can imagine immigrants as fellow human beings, people who belong here as much as anyone else.

To add your name, email your name and title to: theculturestrike [at] gmail.com

CultureStrike is an artist-led initiative that seeks to shift the national imagination on immigration through innovative and urgent collaborations between artists, writers and other cultural workers. We send writers and artists to the frontlines of the immigration civil rights battle--such as our 2011 delegation of 50 writers and artists to Arizona. At CultureStrike.org, our online magazine, we publish the best arts and culture emerging from the immigration counterculture. A collaborative project of the Citizen Engagement Lab and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, we seek to build a cultural movement on immigration.